Cloud consultancy Mirantis on Monday released a series of support options to help customers launch test or full-scale deployments of OpenStack-powered clouds.

The new service is aimed at organizations, or business units within a large company, to try and test out OpenStack, says Mirantis co-founder Boris Renski, who also sits on the OpenStack Foundation's board of directors.

Various other vendors have OpenStack distributions, which are pre-packaged versions of OpenStack software designed to run on mostly Linux operating systems. Canonical, SUSE, Red Hat and Piston Cloud Computing Co. each have OpenStack distributions, for example. Meanwhile, there is a growing ecosystem of consultants that will help organizations launch OpenStack clouds.

Mirantis rolled out three products. DIY Light is a $3,000 package that includes a two-hour phone consultation and a written recommendation from Mirantis on how to launch and architect an OpenStack deployment. For $2,000 more, users get the Light version plus two seats in a monthly training class, plus two months of support for the ongoing OpenStack deployment. A premium version for $15,000 includes an on-site consultation with three months of deployment support, designed for systems that are expected to scale up to a larger size over time. "This is aimed at the grassroots adopters of OpenStack," Renski says. "For the evangelists within an enterprise who have a limited budget and want to try out OpenStack and want to do it right."

The move represents a continuing maturity of the OpenStack ecosystem, which has thus far included many code contributions to the project by vendors to ensure their existing products work within an OpenStack ecosystem. While vendors have begun releasing distributions of the OpenStack code, the broader cloud market seems to be waiting and monitoring user adoption of the platform.

Mirantis is one of the leading OpenStack consultancies, having helped customers such as Cisco, Dell, GE, Agilent, NASA, HP and AT&T launch OpenStack-powered clouds.

Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.

This story, "Consultancy launches DIY cloud, OpenStack-style" was originally published by
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Senior Editor Brandon Butler covers the cloud computing industry for Network World by focusing on the advancements of major players in the industry, tracking end user deployments and keeping tabs on the hottest new startups.